Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  She felt something in her arms, something warm and wonderful that squirmed and snuggled her.

  She was holding Bubble. She cried in her sleep, knowing it wasn’t him, just the memory of him, a thrilling bundle that vanished as soon as she tried to carry it back into the wide-awake world. She was asleep and yet she was weeping. She thought: That’s strange, I didn’t know you could sleep and cry at the same time.

  She forced herself to open her eyes. Manny wasn’t in the chair anymore. Good, she thought, glad he was gone, even though she missed him.

  She slept. A dark sleep without feeling.

  She woke to harsh morning light. She was sober. Everything hurt. Any movement was painful. The tiniest muscle in her body had been bruised. Her neck was so stiff it might as well have been locked in a steel brace. She would have gone back to sleep, only the pain kept her awake.

  Manny was asleep on a cot by the wall. His mouth sagged open. The presence of the cot was new to her. He was fully dressed and looked uncomfortable.

  She realized she had made a bargain last night. She had agreed to go to sleep in the hope that she would be wakened by her rescued baby, by a miracle.

  There are no miracles, Carla.

  For the first time she knew without any doubt that Bubble was gone. In a cold hopeless way she understood he was dead.

  She wanted to get out of the hospital.

  “Manny…?” The sound of herself was shocking. Not only was she hoarse, but the tones were old and hard. I’m an old woman now, she understood. I’m only twenty-nine but I’m an old woman.

  Manny startled awake. His legs slipped off the cot and he fell half out. The right side of his thick straight black hair, the side that had been on the cot, was ironed the wrong way. It stuck up in the air. “What is it!” he said.

  “Let’s—” She wanted to say, “Let’s get out of here,” but her battered muscles overwhelmed her with pain. She moaned.

  “You need another shot?” Manny was already up, heading for the closed door.

  “No!” she cried out as loudly as she could.

  “Yeah, babe. You need it.” He opened the door and stuck his head out. He called out for a nurse and told someone that his “wife is in pain and needs another shot.” He mumbled more; she couldn’t hear what.

  She wanted to get out of bed. She pulled off the sheet. She was shocked by the fact of her cast. She had forgotten about her broken leg. How the hell was she going to walk?

  The tears started again. This time in anger and frustration.

  “How can I walk!” she yelled at Manny. “I can’t walk,” she blubbered, wanting to be angry, but falling into sadness, into a bottomless loneliness.

  “It’s okay, babe, it’s okay,” Manny rushed at her, nervous and scared. “They’re coming. They’re coming.” He said everything twice, his repetitions a plea for her to be quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” she admitted her shame. She covered herself in his arms and begged: “I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry…”

  “Shh, don’t talk. I’m here…”

  You’re so weak. Calm down. Stop making a fuss.

  “I want to get out of here! I don’t want to be here anymore, Manny! Get me out of here.” She pulled and pushed his shoulders, rocking him back and forth as if his weight were what kept her stuck in grief.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not!” She hit him on the chest. The blow made a hollow sound. She shied away, afraid she had hurt him.

  “There’s nowhere for us to go. We’ve got to stay until they—” he interrupted himself. He looked away from her and shut up guiltily.

  He did know something. “What? Until they what?”

  “Where’s the nurse?” he avoided her ineptly, moving off the bed and returning to the door. He poked his head out and called for a nurse.

  “Stop it, Manny,” she reached after him. The gesture shocked the left side of her body. From the ribs to the neck, her muscles jumped as if they wanted to escape her body. She moaned and fell back. She was in agony and it scared her: the bones and muscles were hot and brittle. Maybe she was in very bad shape, not okay, but seriously, maybe permanently injured. She lay still, tears rolling out of her eyes. She was trapped and helpless: she was never going to get out of that plane.

  Manny charmed the nurse while she took Carla’s temperature and blood pressure. This time the nurse said that instead of an injection, Carla would get two pills. One was Tylenol, the other a muscle relaxant. Manny talked cheerfully. Carla recognized the tone as his I’m-going-for-my-Christmas-tip voice. She heard him use it when she called him at work and one of the residents at his building interrupted with a repair problem. According to Manny it was the old people, the nontippers, who complained the most. Los ricos, the yuppies, who paid incredible rents and handed out Christmas cards with as much as one hundred dollars inside were grateful no matter what you charged, so long as what you did worked. But the old people were irrational, ungrateful and miserly. A few years ago an old woman for whom Manny had slaved all year gave him an envelope with eighty-five cents, fifteen of them in pennies. She complained the next morning that he hadn’t been sufficiently appreciative. Manny talked in the same tone to the nurse that he used with the stingy old people: a singsong that sounded a little dumb and cheerful and very friendly, but also, if you knew Manny, had an echo of mockery.

  “How am I going to walk?” Carla groaned.

  “There you go,” the nurse said, handing Carla the muscle relaxant.

  “I can’t walk with this,” she tapped the cast.

  “We’ll give you crutches,” the nurse said and nudged her with the pill.

  “I hurt all over,” Carla could hear herself whine like a tired toddler, the way Bubble whined…And again her sore puffy eyes were wet with tears.

  “All charley-horsed, right?” the nurse nodded sympathetically. “Same thing happened to me after my brother totaled a car with me in the death seat.”

  “My God!” Manny put a hand on his cheek. His mouth dropped open and his eyes were comically wide. “Were you badly hurt?”

  “Nothing. Not even a scratch.” The nurse turned to Manny, pleased by his responsiveness. “But I couldn’t move the next day. Comes from the adrenaline rush. It’s the same thing you’d feel if you’d lifted weights for hours.”

  “Poor baby,” he said, looking at Carla, but his tone was so general he might mean the nurse’s old accident.

  What is their problem? Why don’t they shut up and leave me alone?

  The drug untied her muscles. Soon they were warm and caressed. Her head, she realized, must have been squeezed by a headache before, because now she felt there was blue sky up there, plenty of space without pain.

  Manny hustled to put away the cot the minute the nurse left. He was afraid of her. Manny would sooner chase a crack dealer from the corner than argue with a nurse or a city bureaucrat. She watched her husband strip the cot, fold it and the sheets, and stack them neatly with anxious speed. He could be a marine hurrying to get ready for inspection.

  “They were very nice to get me this,” he said about the cot when he was all done. He sat on the chair admiring his neat pile of bedding. “Against hospital rules,” he nodded at her.

  She was about to mock his gratitude when she was stopped by a good look at his eyes. His smoky skin, alloyed from his olive Italian father and coffee Filipino mother, was especially dark under his brown eyes. The shadowing lent them a romantic aura. But that morning the skin was blackened by fatigue and grief; it looked almost charred. His eyes were wasted in their burnt setting.

  “I got something to tell you,” Manny said. His legs were spread, elbows on his knees, his head braced by his hands. He looked at the floor. “A guy from the airline came by while you were sleeping.”

  “They found him?” she was able to ask without any trouble. It surprised her. Hearing herself, she thought she sounded bored.

  “They can’t identi—” Manny lowered his head and took a deep breath. He star
ted again, breathing fast: “They can’t be sure it’s his body—” He had to stop. His chest heaved with anxiety. He looked away and mumbled, “Oh God…” He pressed his lips and swallowed. Then he spoke fast: “They’re sending for his hospital records. They’re going to use his footprint.” Again he stopped.

  She remembered. When Bubble was born they took a footprint. So part of him had survived. Her baby’s foot.

  “They don’t think there’s any reason for us to look at—” Manny covered his mouth with his hand and breathed noisily through his nose.

  Not enough left for her to recognize. The image of her beautiful boy being torn apart came into her head without mercy. Manny rushed to hug her, but she looked past him at the ghastly visions of Bubble killed. “I—want—to—go home!” she gasped between her sobs. “Get—me—out of here!”

  “We have to wait, honey,” he whispered. “We’ll go soon.”

  The nurse poked her head in. “She want a sedative?” she asked Manny, as if Carla weren’t competent to answer for herself.

  “No!” Carla shouted. She shook her head vehemently to prove she meant it. “No more drugs!”

  “Relax you,” the nurse said.

  Carla grabbed Manny’s short-sleeved shirt by its cuffs and yanked. “Leave—me—alone!” she choked the words out.

  “Shhh!” Manny pressed her head against his chest. He wasn’t only comforting her; he was worried about her rudeness to the nurse.

  The nurse didn’t care. “You sure?” she asked Carla. “I’ll get somebody…” she said and rushed away.

  Carla concentrated on the look of Manny’s arm. It appeared smooth and soft, but to the touch the muscles were defined and hard. You might think he spent all day weight-lifting rather than fixing leaky pipes, replacing hallway lights, and rewiring intercoms. She stroked the bulge of his forearm, brushing its few hairs. He had lots of thick hair on top of his head and little elsewhere. He was a bastard, the product of his father’s weekend leaves while stationed in the Philippines. Carla assumed Manny’s mother must have been a whore, but he never said so, and he punched a friend who once suggested it. As soon as his mother died Manny made the trip to the States. He was still a teenager when he came to Little Italy to find his long-lost biological father, retired from the service and then the superintendent of a row of tenements on Broome Street. The meeting was a disappointment for both men. At least Manny did get a job out of it. Through a friend of his unacknowledged pop Manny was made assistant porter in a Greenwich Village apartment building, which meant he got all the shit work, running the service elevator, collecting the garbage from each floor and mopping the halls. Once a month he polished all the brass doorknobs. Manny didn’t like the hours or the work, but he liked New York, its ethnic and racial stew, and its promise of doing better. He took the abuse of the doormen and befriended the handyman, who gave him books so he could teach himself about carpentry, plumbing, electricity and compressors and all the gadgets that people use but don’t know how to fix. Eventually, the super was fired, the handyman was promoted and he elevated Manny as well. Manny was the handyman now, and the heir apparent to the superintendent. “You know what that means,” Manny liked to crow to Carla about his vision of their future. “That means someday you get a fancy Manhattan address.” She admired his ambition and willingness to work hard, his belief in the American dream; but she wished he wasn’t so willing to accept insults and pretend thankfulness.

  After she had stopped crying, after her breathing had slowed down, and after she had been quiet for a while, Manny said softly, “I called your mother while you were sleeping. She says it’s all her fault.”

  She nodded, not to agree, just to show she had expected that. Her mother was being literal: Carla and Bubble had gotten on the plane to visit her and her husband in their new home. Carla sighed for an answer. She thought, my mother is crazy.

  “She wanted to come here. I told her that was crazy.”

  “Good,” Carla mumbled. She missed her mother and didn’t want to see her.

  “She said she’s going to New York. She’ll be there when we get back.”

  The whole family would gather. They would fill the house with black clothes and food and tears.

  She shivered. Manny rubbed her arms. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad. “I need a toothbrush.”

  “Okay,” Manny said. But he didn’t move, didn’t get out of her arms.

  The door opened and Bea Rosenfeld looked in. Carla noticed the glasses first, the big square frames sailing on her nose and two glistening jewels at the corners. She remembered that she had spoken to this woman, but not where or when or about what. For a moment Carla thought that Bea was also a passenger and that they had talked on the runway.

  “Hi, I’m Bea Rosenfeld,” She said to Manny. “How are you doing?” she asked Carla.

  Carla nodded.

  “I heard the news about your son. I’m very sorry.”

  Manny’s arms got tight, the hard muscles bulging out from the smooth skin. And he held his breath, as if waiting for something terrible to happen. What was his problem?

  “I also heard from the nurse that you didn’t want any tranquilizers. I told her I thought you were right. Throwing blankets on a fire may put it out, but covering feelings only makes them burn inside.”

  Carla thought Bea was interesting. She remembered they had met in the emergency room. But she felt no need to answer.

  Manny took a breath and shifted. Carla slid off him and reached for the pillow. She had to hang on to something. Manny said: “We don’t know for sure. They’re sending for his records to check the footprints.”

  “Oh…” Bea’s tone was hesitant for the first time. “I see. Did they tell you how long that would take?”

  “They said it wouldn’t take long. They send it through a fax machine. You know?”

  They could be talking about anything.

  “Who are you?” Carla asked Bea.

  Bea smiled at her, as if she were an intelligent child. “You mean what’s my job?”

  Carla nodded.

  “I’m a thanatologist. That’s a very long word which means that I try to help people who have lost someone—isn’t that a funny way to talk?” Bea shook her head. “The words we use for death. ‘Lost someone,’ I said. What I meant was, when someone close to them has died.” She looked at Manny to include him. “I also work with people who are dying.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” Manny said in an awkward mumble.

  “No. I do it for myself.” Bea, still calm, her jeweled glasses hobbling slightly, focused on Carla. “My daughter was killed in a car accident when she was sixteen. She went out to the movies and she never came back. Every time I cried they gave me a sedative. Every time I asked a question they told me to forget. And I never saw her body. They said it was nothing I would want to look at. I’m sure they were right. She must have looked horrible. But now I wish I had seen it. As for the drugs—it took three years for me to stop taking pills and they didn’t get rid of my grief. When I stopped taking them, the grief was still there as if she had died the day before. It’s better to cry and scream bloody murder. You can’t cry for three years.”

  “We’re not looking at the body,” Manny said very definitely. He was so positive that Carla thought he must have already seen it.

  “Why…?” Carla asked. Her mouth was dry. Her top lip peeled off from the bottom. The skin tingled afterwards. She touched it to check if she was bleeding. No.

  Manny meanwhile answered her question with a stare. “They just said there’s—I mean—if it’s him—there’s not much to…”

  “I don’t know,” Bea’s hand went up. “If there’s nothing to recognize, then…” She came over to the bed and asked with a gesture if she could sit. Carla didn’t have the energy to answer. Bea took that as a yes. She settled next to Carla’s head and put a hand on her hair, stroking. The gooseneck reading lamp hung over the bed, brightening only a circle. Bea’s head looked big. The jewels
in Bea’s eyeglasses darkened in the shadows just outside the lamp’s spot. “What happened in the crash? Were you holding him?”

  “Oh!” Manny cried out. Carla shifted to see him. Manny was sweating, although the room was cool from the air-conditioning. He shook his head at Bea.

  “What?” Bea asked him.

  Manny glanced at Carla and went back to Bea. “Can we talk outside?” he pointed to the hall.

  Carla understood. He knew Manny couldn’t bear to hear about her cowardice: he would hate her forever.

  “We should talk,” Bea said to Manny. “But I think Carla needs to talk right now.”

  Manny and Bea went back and forth arguing in a whisper about whether she needed to talk. Carla watched them with interest, but she was hardly with them. She hugged the pillow, enjoying its bulk. She remembered that while she slept Bubble had come back into her arms. She had felt him warm and squirming, so real her heart ached with joy. She shut her eyes and longed for sleep.

  “Are you sleepy?” Bea gently shook Carla’s pillow to bring her into the conversation.

  She nodded. Leave me alone.

  “Are you really sleepy? The nurse told me you were out all night and most of the morning. Are you sleepy or very blue?”

  What do you think!

  Bea studied Carla, searching out from her boat-like glasses into the fog of pain between them. “Tell me what happened,” she spoke almost in a whisper. “They say the plane was in trouble for a long time. It must have been very scary.”

  Carla remembered Lisa the flight attendant. She remembered her face next to hers as they tried to get Bubble’s seat belt to work. Her chin was smeared with lipstick. Lisa tried to fasten his belt, which would have saved his life. Carla peered at Bea through the sharpening focus these thoughts gave her. She noticed parentheses of wrinkles on each side of Bea’s mouth and that her lipstick was redder than Lisa’s. Was Lisa alive? Lisa could tell them she had tried her best.

  But what if Lisa didn’t say that? What if she told them that Carla was hysterical and all thumbs and that it was her fault, that everybody else could make the belts work.